The green Mól goo / "people-goo" / the ooze

It glows, faintly, green going to blue, and it will take the skin off a forearm in a moment. Water will not thin it. It was found flowing on the surface of the old Mól sewers beneath Haudh-Gwenn, and standing in an ornate well in an octagonal chamber below, the rim of the well cut in tall Mól script layered over a magic-writing dialect: a circle of the sort that wards a thing off, but keyed to an elemental power rather than to an alignment, and inverted, so that it holds the thing in.

Magic worked on it comes back stronger. A mage hand dipped in to fill a vial was tugged at as it went, and came away noticeably heavier. Alchemists buy it as catalyst, reactant, accelerant and reagent, and Mól alchemy, which breaks every ingredient down into a handful of base components, holds it to be catalyst and accelerator at once, which almost nothing else is.

What it is, the Elder told them in the keep below. A metropolis of tens of thousands lived above that place, and when the curse came through, every mind, body and soul present that day was broken down into core elements and mixed with the great water elemental bound at the keep’s entrance. That is the sludge. It took only those who were there; nobody who came after has been taken.

Whether any of them is awake in it was never discovered. A creature summoned to smell out evil found none in the stuff, only the old evil of the cells around it. And yet a crystal of it, pushed through the membrane of another ooze entirely, woke as a whole woman with her memories from before the melting intact. Rheem walks about today because of that. The Elder would say only that its use would be knowingly evil if the souls persist.

Which was the worst of the news for Gwenivere Velmont, who had been buying it by the shipment and putting it in the medicines she gave her patients, and who learned what it was in a room with the people who had just found out. Ashanti had already brewed it into a draught that permanently widened Mikhail’s reserves. Gwen had hoped it might cure her Magiauredo. It never could. What it had been doing was holding the disease off, and she had been taking it past need and without admitting it for years; cut from it, she was given months, or a year or two, and there is no cure for the thing.

The bulk of it went back where it had been: the keep’s own machinery draws every drop up the central tube and locks it behind the priming runes, and there it sat until the morning it was burned. That it could be burned at all came from the Iophanite, which told the party at Vëné’s grave that the souls in the stuff had been joined to the elemental by alchemy and could be parted the same way. Ashanti built the reaction around that, and the one thing it wanted that could not be bought was pearl ash, in the quantity an army has to burn forests to make.

At sunrise, in the condemned and emptied property above the well, Mikhail ran the reaction with Ashanti calling the sequence, and after a week of drilling he no longer needed the calls. It boiled and popped and stank past bearing, and then it came apart in front of them, visibly, into the two things it had been made from: the souls of the people who had been there went out of the world, and the water-elemental matter they had been bound into went back to the elemental planes, disjoined after hundreds of years. The curse over that keep broke with it. Where the souls went from there is not agreed on: the Mól taught that a soul joins the inner planes at death, while the Chantry of Tranquility holds that the mind goes into the dreaming and the soul stays there ever after, and reads the whole ooze as ancestors granting one last blessing to their descendants. Mikhail would not leave the room until it had finished burning, and Aldo had to walk him out by the arm. All he said on the way was that he felt sick.

Odd amounts are loose in the world still. Aldo had a bucket of it and where the bucket went was never written down; a vial Koa scraped from the sewer fissure went to Harad; a seller nobody has yet stopped still picks his way out of the ruins with it. Someone has been breaking the crystalline plugs at that fissure, and the fear is that the Silver Web is powering itself on the dead of Haudh-Gwenn. More of it lies under and beside the river at the ruins, untouched, and Mikhail wants that burned next. The Elder’s own count was worse: it has been seeping out of the keep for centuries, and there may be caches of it under the town that nobody has ever found.